Best Of the Vest: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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Another superhero film, another superhero game. Wolverine will be appearing in his own third-person action adventures from May 1st. The Unreal-powered stabbing game sure does look pretty, but I sense there may be little more to this than a series of beat ’em up clearances, and some spectacular quick-time events. Yes, I’m being all sulky and sceptical and adolescent – Watchmen syndrome? – you don’t have to take my forecast for granted: the hair-horned one gets violent after the jump.

It might be less well known than Watchmen but the original origin (I’m sorry, English language) of Wolverine was done by Barry Widson Smith, one of my favourite comic book artists. It was called “Weapon X”. While it wasn’t on the level of Watchmen, it is something of a minor masterpiece in my opinion. Amazing merge of lettering/comic art, forward-thinking tricks with panelling and the dialogue captions, amazing use of the then very limited way Marvel colored its comics. And of course very expressively drawn by BWS in his then nascent pre-Raphaellite style. You should all go read it before this movie/game comes out so you can be annoyed all over again like we all were with Watchmen.

There is also a ‘Wolverine: Origins” marvel comic which was a remake along with earlier stuff, I found it very bland as compared to BWSmith’s work.

This game seems more interesting and less insulting that the Watchmen game though simply because I have no sentiment to spare for the character or his legacy. Videogames is what Wolverine longed to be anyway.

Oh come off it; cheap argument. You know full well that’s not how things work.

Accepting a single fantastic premise doesn’t mean that you’re a hypocrite if you don’t like certain others – even within the same work.

Equally, having a fantastic premise doesn’t mean a work has no responsibility to be consistent. You set out the ground rules at the start and then you play by them – changing them halfway through is bad form. People are going to be annoyed if things don’t work the way you led them to expect.

I don’t even care about deflecting rockets but it really gets up my nose when that bloody argument gets trotted out as a discussion ender…

X-men the last stand was soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo bad that my expectations for this movie are at a record low, i seriously doubt they could disappoint me, but then again, they did make Catwoman (and some others i rather forget)

Really? We must not be reading the same comics. Civil War – Wolverine regrows himself completely from just a few non-incinerated cells in just a few minutes which, I’m sure you’ll agree, pushes the idea of a mutant ‘healing factor’ into nigh-supernatural territory. Also, we learn that every time he dies he literally has to fight the spirit of death before he can return. Then he gets his ass handed to him by Wild Child, and learns he and Sabertooth are the embodiements of feral archetypes stretching back through to the dawn of man who – shock horror – have been at each other’s throats all that time. Oh, and Sabertooth eats the midriff of Feral (or Thorrn – can’t remember which), all because some Uber-bad dude has some all-encompassing power over feral types.

Sounds to me more like shark-jumping desperation from the writers there than anything I’d class as ‘good’.

regenerating himself from a few cells left ? it was idiotic when dragon ball did it, and it still is, maybe with his upper torso left but a few cells … every time he cuts his hair or nails or goes to a spa you get a few dozen/hundred new wolvies running around …

…which is oddly, ironically, like the Ao Jun character he and Domino encountered during the Grant Morrison run of New X-Men. Dead skin cells turned into shambling ‘golem’ replicas. Dialogue from the issue: